The Eternal Flame

34

Carlo arrived a few chimes early to take over from Macaria. Having done the arborine night shift himself for a stint he knew how tiring it was: the less active the animals were, the harder it had been to keep watching them closely without his mind wandering. It was only by constantly reminding himself of what a few lapses of inattentiveness might cost him that he’d managed to stay awake to the end of each shift.

“Anything unusual?” he asked.

“Zosimo was up for about a bell, leaping around the cage,” Macaria recounted. “At one point he woke his co; I was sure something was going to happen. But in the end all they did was exchange a few calls. Benigna and Benigno slept through all the drama.”

“Hmm.” Carlo had read old reports, written on the home world, claiming that arborines in the forests had been seen waking at night in order to breed. But he had doubts about the veracity of those accounts, let alone their relevance to these captives twice removed from their ancestors’ original habitat.

“There ought to be something we can do to encourage them,” Macaria said wearily. “Both couples are reproductively mature, so what are they waiting for? There must be some environmental change that would clinch it. Maybe a dietary signal—”

“If we increase the food supply any more, we risk them becoming quadraparous,” Carlo replied.

“Would that be so terrible? If you really want to understand the signaling during fission, aren’t you going to need to compare biparous and quadraparous versions at some point?”

That might have been a reasonable attitude if they’d had an unlimited supply of experimental subjects, and as many lifetimes as they needed to achieve the project’s goal. Carlo said, “If we don’t get a tape of biparous fission from this lot, you can volunteer to catch the next four arborines.”

Macaria left him to it.

Carlo positioned himself on the guide rope midway between the two cages, at a point where he could see Benigna and Benigno in his rear gaze and Zosima and Zosimo to the front. The flowers adorning the scaffolding of amputated branches that crisscrossed each cage were still putting out light, more or less following their original alternating cycles, but over the last few days he’d begun to notice a decline in their luminance. As the imitation forest faded the moss-light took over, and the whole place began to look more like a prison of bare rock decorated with a few wan twigs.

The observers’ shifts were synchronized to the arborines’ activity, and he’d arrived just in time to watch all four animals waking. The females, pinned to their heavy plinths, had long ago ceased making vigorous attempts to detach themselves, but their posture and movements changed completely once they were conscious, with the uncoordinated twitches and flailing of sleep replaced by an eerily disciplined-looking series of muscular stretches and rearrangements of the flesh. Benigna and Zosima in their separate cages performed an almost identical set of exercises, which suggested that they were instinctive responses to their lack of mobility—perhaps as a way of maintaining health while recovering from an injury. But it was possible that there was a component of mimicry as well; from their plinths, they could see each other clearly enough. Mimicry? Encouragement? Solidarity? Zosima had carried Benigna’s limp body through the forest unflaggingly while Carlo pursued her. It was hard not to think of the two of them as fellow prisoners, aware of each other’s plight, striving to keep up each other’s morale.

For their part, the males did not remain still for long either: every few lapses either Zosimo or Benigno made a sudden leap from one branch to another. Though the cages were currently empty of lizards, to Carlo these moves looked similar to ones the arborines used when ambushing prey. He wasn’t sure if they had failed to grasp the unfamiliar rules governing the presence of the lizards and had started jumping at shadows in the hope that it might be food, or, like the females, they were merely intent on staying active.

In the light of Macaria’s report Carlo paid special attention to Zosimo. The male was certainly more agitated than usual, swaying restlessly on each branch before flinging himself onto the next. The cage was just a couple of stretches across, so Zosimo couldn’t help revisiting the same locations—but far from executing a tight, repetitive cycle, he crisscrossed the miniature forest in an elaborate sequence of permutations of departure points and destinations, as if intent on squeezing as much novelty out of his impoverished surroundings as he could.

When feeding time came, Carlo fetched two lizards from the storeroom; they squirmed in protest for a while, then went limp in his hands as if they could save themselves by playing dead. The arborines must have learned the routine by now, but they didn’t hang around like supplicants as he approached. Benigno clung, aloof, to a distant branch while Carlo tossed the lizard through the bars of his cage. Zosimo was positively disdainful, baring his teeth at Carlo threateningly, but he too kept his distance.

Carlo returned to his observation post. He’d seen these hunts too many times now to remain enthralled from start to finish, but it was impossible to ignore them completely. The cages were small, but every branch held a dozen hiding places, and the lizards always vanished from sight long before the arborines showed any interest in them. Today the pursuit seemed unhurried at first, almost desultory: Zosimo crossed from branch to branch purposefully a few times, then appeared to grow distracted, while Benigno’s bounces, more playful than stealthy, sent luminous petals wafting through the air.

Carlo’s thoughts wandered, but he was aware of the two arborines gradually narrowing the search: jumping to a new branch, looking about for a moment, then feigning indifference and pretending to be more concerned with swatting at mites. It was nearly a chime later when things sped up, rapidly; Carlo could hear one lizard’s panicked claws as it fled along a branch before Zosimo reached out and snatched at it. The lizard must have jumped to another branch, because the hand came back empty, but then Zosimo leaped after it and moments later he had it in his mouth and was biting it in two.

Zosimo chewed on half the lizard, chirping softly with pleasure. There was a flurry of activity in the rear of Benigno’s cage, but Carlo couldn’t see what was happening so he stayed focused on Zosimo. The arborine swallowed his share of the meal, then swung down to the branch closest to his trapped co. He handed Zosima the remainder of the lizard; as she raised it to her mouth he reached across and ran a hand over the side of her face.

Carlo watched her eating, Zosimo beside her. For the first few days both of the males had tried to help their cos work the light probes out of their flesh, but the tubes were hardstone, impossible to bend or break, and Carlo had melded the females’ skin together around half a dozen loops set into the plinth. No ordinary deformation of the flesh could free them, and even if they’d grown desperate enough to bite or scratch themselves loose there was no access for teeth or claws.

The females had been unconscious for the surgery, and the aftermath should not have been painful, but Carlo still felt a twinge of revulsion at the fate he’d imposed on them. They would divide, or they would stay trapped: that was the verdict he’d written in stone.

Zosima had finished eating. She called out with an elaborate sequence of chirps, and when she received no reply she repeated herself; the pattern was almost identical, but some notes now rose more emphatically above the rest. After a moment Zosimo responded.

The exchange continued, longer and more elaborate than any Carlo had heard before. He’d been taught that the arborines lacked a true language, but he doubted that anyone was in a position to know. In the old reports there had been a crude attempt to classify the cries, but no systematic annotation of their structure. If the day ever came when future biologists were free of more desperate concerns, it might be worth someone’s time to spend a year in the forest, just watching these animals and listening to their calls.

Zosima stretched a hand up from the plinth; her co took it and she drew him toward her. Carlo hesitated, afraid for a moment that he was deceiving himself and misinterpreting the encounter. But Zosimo had released his hold on the branch and the two were maneuvering into a tight embrace. Carlo scrambled quickly along the cross rope and reached the lever under the front of the cage.

He tugged on it; it stuck. Trying not to panic, he pushed back on the lever and worked it past the obstruction, then he succeeded in disengaging the brake. The sudden clatter of the six light recorders was so loud that he feared it would startle the arborines into changing their minds, but when he looked up they were undeterred, oblivious to the machinery.

As Carlo watched them he was unable to dismiss a shameful sense of voyeurism, though it was doubly absurd when the recorders were capturing far greater intimacies than his gaze. But the arborines’ posture had never looked more like their cousins’, and the shape they made together was disturbingly close to the vision of Carla and himself that years of anticipation had burned into his brain. This was not like breeding voles.

Zosima grew still, but Zosimo continued to stroke her face as if to comfort her. A yellow glow shone out from the skin where they were joined: the male’s promise in light, committing him to care for the children. Carlo couldn’t untangle how much of his discomfort at the sight was guilt at forcing the arborines’ choice and how much was a rebuke from the part of his mind that would judge his own life worthless until he’d made the same promise himself.

Abruptly, the noise from the recorders took on a new component: the sound of paper being shredded. “No, no, no!” Carlo dragged himself under the cage into the dimly lit equipment hatch. As he approached the offending machine the tearing was replaced by a rhythmic thwack; the tape had broken completely and the loose end from the driven reel was whipping against the chassis. He shut off the motor and quickly removed both reels, but it took him another few lapses to tug all the fragments of damaged tape from between the capstans, then load a fresh reel and restart the machine.

As he emerged from the hatch and climbed toward the observation post, he saw that Zosimo had broken free of his co and moved back to the branch that overhung the plinth. Zosima was limbless now, and Carlo watched, disquieted, as her anatomy began to surrender features that no conscious effort could have changed. The ridges of her tympanum sunk into the membrane, then the whole glorious structure merged with the top of her chest, resorbed as easily as an impromptu arm. Her closed mouth, the dark lips already strangely flattened, lost its usual contrast with the skin of her face until it faded entirely from view. Her eyelids were the last aspect to go, the pale slitted ovals rotated and stretched out vertically, distorted like the remnants of insignificant wounds as the head itself began to reform. It was as if an unseen sculptor, having crafted this body in resin years ago, had returned to swipe her thumbs across the remains of the ruined face before squeezing the entire figurine into an undifferentiated lump, mere material now, ready to be reused.

Zosimo emitted a long, mournful hum. Carlo looked up at him, struggling to retain a sense of distance, but then the arborine’s whole body began to shake with anguish. Nature had bribed both participants in this metamorphosis, imbuing the act with an incomparable sense of joy, but while a vole could pass untroubled from the raw pleasure of triggering fission to the compelling obligations of nurturing his young, this arborine understood what he had lost. The companion who had loved and protected him all his life had just been erased before his eyes. What else should that elicit but grief?

Carlo averted his gaze and tried to regain his composure. How had he imagined it would feel, when he and Carla finally brought her life to an end? Had he ever really fooled himself into believing that he’d be borne through it all in a daze, anesthetized by the biological imperative, untouched by the gravity of what he’d done? No man ever told his children anything but anodyne lies, but if he could forgive his father for sparing him as a boy he could not forgive his own cowardice since. All his training, all his animal experiments, had only helped him bury the truth under a mountain of facts. He had to accept that his life’s greatest purpose, the one role that would make him complete, could never be right, could never be bearable, could never be forgiven. It wouldn’t matter how long they waited, it wouldn’t matter what plans they’d made, it wouldn’t matter how willingly they took the final step. In the end he would know exactly what he’d done, with only the children to keep him sane.

And that only if their number was right.

Carlo looked up. Zosimo was huddled against the branch, swaying, his upper arms wrapped around his head. He had fallen silent, but now Benigno and Benigna were howling in reply. But through all the arborine sorrow, Carlo finally had something to celebrate himself.

The surface of the blastula was marked with its first partition—and it was transverse, not longitudinal. Zosima would divide into just two children, and there was a chance that the light recorders had captured the signals underlying this result.